by 8 Degrees of Latitude

I’ve always had this intuitive feeling that ‘going back’ is a path fraught with disappointment, a sure way to lance the boil of regret that grows quietly on the under-side of nostalgia.

In love, in career and travel, ‘going back’ risks curdling all that warm milky romance that time so gently nurture us with – after the event.

Lovers of great tenderness and dreadsome mood swings are longed for with a ferocity far beyond their worth after a month (or a day) of separation. And places of enchantment, where younger dreams were conceived are likely to have fallen to the bulldozer, been riddled with billboards or standardised by the Sheraton.

Or fallen into the weird, desperate grip of ex-pats, like Vilcabamba.

Twenty years ago I stumbled across this tiny hamlet in the low eastern bosom of the Ecuadorian Andes in most unusual circumstances. I was 22. I was on the…